She has some good points to share occasionally but I stopped reading her comments because I just know that she will end up ranting on how everyone else is not as "sad/bad/mad/suffering/???" as hers are or some such confusion.

I don't get these "my child will NEVER understand/be able to do XYZ" absolute declarations.

Are all these people claiming to have some kind of magic crystal ball to see into their children's futures? Why is not having a certain skill, or not having it by a certain age, considered some kind of reliable unerring predictor of whether someone will ever have a totally separate skill or interest as an adult?

We've definitely known autistic people whose parents were told things like that they would never be able to learn, when they were children, and are very obviously capable of it, as adults. (Not that I think they were incapable of learning as children either-- I don't think anyone is-- but learning in a way where no one denies that they're learning, or claims they don't really write the things they write, etc.)

We remember adults who talked in front of us and said things about us, when we were very young and had little expressive language that wasn't echolalic, and thought we couldn't hear or understand. We remember adults who would turn to each other and say things like "She can't understand. She doesn't know what you're talking about," when we had understood most or all of what they were saying, but just didn't have enough expressive language to form a response. People who claimed that we liked things we didn't like, or didn't like things we did, or couldn't understand something that they did. Knowing they were wrong, the frustration of it, not being able to tell them they were wrong.

I can only imagine how much more infuriating and frightening it would have been if people had continued to say that kind of thing about us regularly as we got older, and we hadn't managed to pick up enough patterns of expressive language to at least give the impression of being able to understand things. Every time I hear someone declaring "my child will never do/understand/appreciate/etc," I can't help but be afraid for that child, growing up surrounded by people denying their understanding and communication at every turn. (Sort of like how autistic adults who watched "Autism Every Day" could see that the children were communicating and interacting with the world around them while the adults in the video thought they were unresponsive.)

Anyway... this is a great Square Talk, as usual. I never know whether to laugh or cry either.